Chapter VII

He could not at once discern in the darkness who it was that opened the door, and he remained an aloof black shape against the moon-glare, lifting his cap and saying, "I am sorry to knock you up at this hour," so for a minute Marion had the amusing joy of seeing him as he appeared to other people, remote and vigilant and courteous and really more hidalgoesque than the occasion demanded. She laughed teasingly. The hard line of him softened, and he said, "Mother," and stepped over the threshold and folded her in his arms, and kissed her on the lips and hair. She rested quietly within his groping, pressing love. This indoor darkness where they stood was striped with many lines of moonlight coming through cracks in doors and the margins of blinds, so that it seemed to have no more substance than a paper lanthorn, and outside the white boles and branches of the lit leafless trees were as luminous stencillings on the night. There was nothing solid in the world but their two bodies, nothing real but their two lives.

She did not ask him why he had come at this hour. There was indeed nothing so very unusual in it, for more than once when he was a sailor she had been wakened by the patter of pebbles on her window and had looked down through the darkness on the whitish oval of his face, marked like a mask with his eagerness to see her; and later, in southern countries, he had often walked quietly into the dark, cool room where she lay having her siesta, though she had thought him a hundred miles away, and it had seemed as if nothing could move in the weighty heat outside save the writhing sea. It had always seemed appropriate to their relationship that he should come to her thus, suddenly and without warning and against the common custom. Thus had he come to be born.

She pushed him away from her. "Have you put your motor-cycle in the shed?" she asked indifferently.

"No. It's outside the gate."

"Put it in. There may be frost by the morning."

He turned away to do it. To him it was always heaven, like the peace of dreamless sleep, to hand over to her the heavy sword of his will.

She watched him go out into the white ecstatic glare and pass behind the illuminated twiggy bareness of the hedge, which looked like the phosphorescent spine of some monstrous stranded fish. This was a strange night, crude as if some coarse but powerful human intelligence were co-operating with nature. She had a fancy that if she strained her ears she might hear the whirr of the great dynamo that served this huge electric moon. But however the night might be, this strange, dangerous son of hers was a match for it. She looked gloatingly after him as he passed out of her sight, and then turned and went into the kitchen. It was easy to prepare him a meal, for there was a gas-stove and the stores lay at her hand, each in its own place, since in her five minutes' visit to the cook every morning she imposed the same nervous neatness here and kept the rest of the house rectangular and black and white.

She heard the closing of the front door and his steps coming in search of her. She liked to think of him finding his way to her by the rays of light warmer than moonlight through half-open doors. If it had been anyone else in the world that was coming towards her she would have gathered up her thick plaits and pinned them about her head. But from him she need not hide the signs, which made all other people hate her, that she had been beautiful and had been destroyed.

When he came in she said, "Light the other gas-jets. Yes, both of them."

Now there was a lot of light. She could see the bird's-wing brilliance of his hair, the faint bluish bloom about his lips, that showed he had not shaved since morning, the radiance of his eyes and the flush on his cheeks that had come of his enjoyed ride through the cold moony air. The queer things men were, with their useless, inordinate, disgusting yet somehow magnificent growth of hair on their faces, and their capacity for excitements that have nothing to do with emotion....

He came and stood beside her and slipped his arm round her waist and murmured, "Well, Marion?" and laughed. Always he had loved calling her that, ever since as a little boy he had found her full name written in an old book and had run to her, crying, "Is that really your lovely name?" Even more than by the name itself had he been pleased by the way it was written, squintwise across the page and in a round hand, exactly as he himself was then writing his own name in his first school books. It made him see his mother as a little girl, and helped him to dream his favourite dream that he and she were just the same age and could go to school and play games together. It still gave him an inexplicable glow of pleasure, the memory of that brownish signature staggering across the flyleaf of "Jessica's First Prayer."

She perceived that he was violently excited at coming back to her, but she took the toast from under the grill, buttered it, set it on the warm plate, and poured the eggs on it with an ironical air of absorption. These two went very carefully and mocked each other perpetually so that the gods should not overhear and be jealous. "Now, eat it while it's hot!" she said, holding out the plate.

He put it down on the kitchen table and gathered her into his arms.

"Well, mother?" he murmured, looking down at her, worshipping her.

"Oh, my boy," she whispered, "you've lost your brown, up there in Scotland."

"Oh, I'm all right. But you?"

"As well as well can be."

"But, mother dear, you look as if you'd been having those bad dreams."

"No, I've had none, none at all."

"That means not too many. Does it?"

They kissed, and he said tenderly yet harshly: "Roger hasn't been bothering you?"

"Ah, the poor thing, don't speak of him like that," she said. "No, but I've not heard from him for six weeks. Not even at Christmas. I'm a little anxious. But it may be all right. You remember last Christmas there was a time when he didn't write. I expect it'll be all right." But with her eyes she abandoned herself to fear, so that he should soothe her and stroke her hands with his, which were trembling in spite of their strength because he was so glad to see her.

"Mother, darling, I have hated leaving you alone. But it was necessary. I've done good work this winter." He made with one hand a stiff and sweeping movement that expressed his peculiar kind of arrogance, which stated that his was the victory, now and for ever, and yet took therefrom no pride for himself. "I've pulled it off," he said jeeringly, and smiled at her derisively but with tight lips, as if they must take this thing lightly or some danger would spring. "Where I get my brains from I don't know," he muttered teasingly, and put out his hand and traced the interweaving strands in one of her plaits. "What hair you've got!" he said. "I've never seen a woman with ..." He started violently and was silent.

She cried out, "What is it?" But he answered, speaking clippedly, "Oh, nothing, nothing...."

So evidently was he overcoming a moment of utter confusion that she turned away and busied herself with the coffee.

Behind her his voice spoke falsely, uplifted in a feint of the surprised recollection which at its first coming had struck him dumb the previous moment. "And Ellen! I'm a nice sort of lover to be five minutes in the house without asking for my Ellen! How is she? How have you been getting on together?"

"Oh, your dear Ellen!" she cried fervently. But her heart went cold within her. He was right. It was against nature that he should have forgotten the woman he loved when he came under the roof where she was sleeping her beautiful sleep. Could it be that Ellen was not the woman he loved and that his engagement to her was some new joke on the part of destiny? She whirled round to have a look at him, exclaiming to make time, "Oh, she is the most wonderful creature who ever lived." But he had forgotten his embarrassment now, and was standing with bent head, thinking intently, and on his face there was the dazzled and vulnerable look of a man who is truly in love. Well, if that were so, why could it not be pure and easy joy for them both, as it was for other sons and mothers when there were happy marriage afoot? Why must their life, even in such parts of it as escaped the shadow of Peacey or Roger, be so queer in climate? This time it was Richard's fault. She had been willing to be lightly, facilely happy over it like other people. Her spirit snarled at him, and she cried out impatiently, "Go and eat your eggs before they're cold." As Richard took his seat, moving slowly and trancedly, and began to eat his food with half indifference because of his dreams, she took the chair at the other end of the table, and, cupping her chin in her hands, stared at him petulantly.

"Why didn't you tell me in your letters how beautiful she was?" she demanded.

He answered mildly, "Didn't I?"

"No, you didn't," she told him curtly. "You said you thought her pretty. Thought her pretty, indeed, with that hair and that wonderful Scotch little face!..."

She caught her breath in irritation at the expression on his face, the uneasy movement from side to side of his eyes which warred with the smile on his lips. Why, when he thought of his love, need he have an air as if he listened to two voices and was distressed by the effort to follow their diverse musics? But she could not quarrel with him for long, for he was wearing the drenched and glittering look which was given him by triumph or hard physical exercise and which always overcame her heart like the advance of an army. His flesh and hair seemed to reflect the light as if they were wet, but neither with sweat nor with water. Rather was it as if he were newly risen from a brave dive into some pool of vitality whose whereabouts were the secret that made his mouth vigilant. Even he had the dazed, victorious look of a risen diver. Utterly melted, she cried out, "I am so glad you have come home."

He started, and came smiling out of his dream. "I am so glad to be here," he said. They laughed across the table; the strong light showed them the dear lines they knew on one another's faces. "That's why," he cried brilliantly, "I've come at this ungodly hour. I had to be here. I got into London at nine o'clock and I went and had some dinner at the Station Hotel. But I felt wretched. Mother, I'm getting," he announced with a naïve triumph, "awfully domestic. I got the hump the minute Ellen left Edinburgh. I felt I must come down to you at once, so I went and got the cycle and started off straight away, and I would have been here by midnight if I hadn't had a smash at Upminster. No, I wasn't hurt. Not a scrap. It was at the beginning of that garden suburb. God, it must be beastly living in those new houses; like beginning to colour a pipe. I'm glad we live in this old place. Well, a chap who'd bought some timber at an auction down in Surrey, and was taking it home to Laindon, dropped a log off his lorry, and I smashed into it and burst a tyre and broke half a dozen spokes in my front wheel, so I had to hunt round till I found a garage, and when I did I had to spend hours tinkering the machine up. The man who owned the place came down in his pyjamas and a dressing-gown and sat talking about his wife. She hadn't wanted to let him come down because it was so late. 'Is that a woman who'll help a man in his business, I ask you?' he kept on saying. Mustn't it be queer to have womenfolk with whom one doesn't feel identical?" They exchanged a boastful look of happiness, the intensity of which, however, seemed the last effort he found possible. For his lids drooped, and he supported his head on his hand and took a deep drink, and said drowsily, "I'm glad to be here."

She went and stood beside him and stroked his hair. "I should have come to you at Aberfay," she grieved. "But I knew I couldn't stand the winter, and I would only have been a nuisance to you if I had been ill all the time. Did the woman feed you properly, dear?"

He said, without looking up, "I wouldn't have let you come. It was a God-forsaken hole. I couldn't have stood it if it hadn't been for"--he gave it out with an odd hesitancy, almost as if he were boyishly shy--"Ellen. And I had to stand it, so that I could pull this thing off."

She asked, "What thing, my dear?" though she was not so very greatly interested. By daylight her ambition for him was fanatic and without limit. But in this stolen hour, when no one knew that they were together, she let herself feel something like levity about his doings. It seemed enough, considering how glorious he was, that he should merely be.

He began to eat again and told the story tersely between mouthfuls. "You know the reason that I stayed up in Edinburgh after I'd sent off Ellen was that I thought I had to show the directors what I'd been doing at Aberfay next Thursday. They were to come on to me after they'd paid their visit to the Clyde works. Well, they came yesterday instead. Sir Vincent has to go to America sooner than he expected, so he wanted to get it over. When they saw what I'd been trying for during the last six months they got excited. As a matter of fact it is pretty good. I wish I could tell you about it, but you know I can't. Also I had told McDermott that Dynevors, the Birmingham people, had heard my contract was up in March, and wanted to buy me. So they got frightened, and offered me a new contract that they thought would keep me." He had finished his meal, and he pushed away his plate and stretched himself, looking up at her and smiling sleepily.

"Have you taken it?"

"Rather. It couldn't have been better."

"What is it?"

"They've doubled my screw and given me an interest in the business."

"How?"

He shook his head, yawning. "A permanent agreement ...percentages ...I'm too woolly-headed to tell you now."

"But what does it mean? You don't care about money or position as a rule. You've always told me that your work was enough for you. Why are you so pleased?" Though the moment before she had thought she cared nothing for the ways that his soul travelled, she was in an agony lest he had been changed by the love of woman and had become buyable.

He read her perfectly, and pulled himself out of his drowsiness to reassure her. "No, I'm not being glad because I'm pleasing them; I'm glad because now I can make them please me. It's what I've always been working for, and it's come two years before I expected it. I've got my footing in the biggest armament firm in England. I'm the youngest director. I've got"--again he made that stiff, sweeping gesture of arrogance that was not vanity--"the best brain of them all. In ten years I shall be someone in the firm. In twenty years I shall be nearly everybody. And think of what sport industry's going to be during the next half-century while this business of capital and labour is being fought out, particularly to a man like me, who's got no axe to grind, who's outside all interests, who, thanks to you, doesn't belong to any class. And you see I needn't be afraid of losing my power to work if I meddle in affairs. I'm definitely, finally, unalterably a scientific man. I've got that for good. That's thanks to you too."

"How could your stupid old mother do that?" she murmured protestingly.

"You're not stupid," he said, and bending down he kissed her head where it lay on his shoulder. "Whatever good there is in me I've got from you. You gave me my brain. And I'm able to do scientific work because of the example you've been to me, though I'm rottenly unfit for it myself. Mother, look at my hands. Do you see how they're shaking? They're steady enough when I'm doing anything, but often when there's nothing to be done they shake and shake. My mind's like that. When there's someone to impress or govern I'm all right. But when I'm alone it shakes--there's a kind of doubt. And there's such a lot of loneliness in scientific work, when even science isn't there. Then that comes.... Doubt. Not of what one's doing, but of what one is; or where one is. I never would have kept on with it if it hadn't been for your example. I couldn't have pushed on. I would have gone off and done adventurous things.

"Do you remember that French chap who wanted me to go with him into British Guiana? I'd have liked that. There's nothing stops one thinking so well as being a blooming hero; and it's such fun. And why should one go on doing this lonely work that's so hellishly hard? Of course it's important. Mother, Science is the most wonderful thing in the world. It's a funny thing that if you think and talk about the spirit you only look into the mind of man, but if you cut out the spirit and study matter you look straight into the mind of God. But what good is that when you know that at the end you're going to die and rot and there's not the slightest guarantee which would satisfy anybody but a born fool that God had any need of us afterwards? You can't even console yourself with the thought that it's for the good of the race, because that will die and rot too when the earth grows cold. One has to stake everything on the flat improbability that service of the truth is a good in itself, such a good that it's worth while sacrificing one's life to it.

"That's where you've been such a help to me. You had no justification for supposing that life was worth living. You'd every reason to suppose that the whole business was foul, and the only sensible thing to do was to get all the fun one could out of it. If you had determined to be as little a mother to me as you could I would have understood it, considering of what I must have reminded you. You'd money, you were beautiful, you've always been able to attract people. You might so easily have gone away from here and made a life of your own and just kept me in the corner of your eye, as lots of unhappily married women that one meets keep their children. Instead you shut yourself up here and gave yourself utterly to looking after me. I sometimes feel that the reason I've grown up taller and less liable to illness than other men is that you loved me so much when I was a child. You seemed to pour your life into me. And you didn't just take pleasure in me. You trained me, and I must have been a nasty little brute to train. Do you remember licking me because I went to that circus? You took it out of yourself teaching me to be straight and decent. If you'd been an ordinary married woman who believed that you'd go to hell if you didn't do your duty by your children, and who knew she'd get public respect and the devotion of her husband as a reward for doing it, the way you did it would have been magnificent. But to do it like that when you knew that there was no such thing as justice in heaven or earth--I tell you, mother, it's kept me going to think of the sacrifice you made for me--"

"Oh no," she cried. "It wasn't a sacrifice at all, my dear, to be with you."

"It must have been," he said harshly, as if he were piling up a case against a malefactor, "for you of all women." He drew her alongside of him and stared up at her. "Weren't there bad times, when you hated being cheated of your youth? When you longed for a husband--for some man to adore you and look after you? When you felt bitter because it had all been over so soon?" She averted her face, but his arm gripped her waist more closely, and he asked pleadingly, "Mother, let me know everything about you. I'll be married soon. There'll be no more talking like this while the moon goes down after that. Let me know everything you've done for me, everything you've given me. Why shouldn't I know how wonderful you are? Tell me, weren't there bad times?"

Slowly and reluctantly she turned towards him a face that, wavering with grief, looked strangely childish between her two greying plaits. "I never went to a dance," she said unsteadily. "Isn't it silly of me I mind that?... Till a few years ago I couldn't bear to hear dance music...."

"Oh, you poor darling!--and you would have danced so beautifully!" he cried in agony, and drew her into his arms. She tried to beat herself free and twisted her mouth away from his consoling kisses, so that she might sob, "But it wasn't a sacrifice, it wasn't a sacrifice! Those were only moods. I never really wanted anything except to be with you!" But her bliss in him had been too tightly strung by his sudden coming and by his open speech of that concerning which they spoke as seldom as the passionately religious speak of God, so for a little time she had to weep. But presently she stretched out her hand and pressed back his seeking mouth.

"Hush!" she said with a grave wildness. "We must not talk like this."

He lifted his face, which was convulsed with love and pain, and found her stern as a priestess who defends her mystery from violation. Meekly he let his arms fall from her body and turned away, resting his head on his hand and staring at a blank wall.

She saw that she had hurt him. She drew close to him again, and murmured lovingly, though still with defensive majesty: "Why should we talk of it, my boy? It's all over now, and you're a made man. This contract really does mean that, doesn't it?"

He answered, patting her hand to show that he submitted to her in everything, "Oh, in the end it means illimitable power."

To give him pleasure she exchanged with him a brilliant and triumphant glance, though at this moment she felt that her love for him concerned itself less with ambition than she had ever supposed. Incredulously she whispered to her harsh, sceptical mind that it almost seemed as if its sphere were not among temporal things. But it gave her a real rapture to perceive in his eyes the elder brother of the expression that had always dwelt there in his childish days when he announced to her his cricket-scores and his prizes; even so, she had thought then, the adjutant of a banished leader might hand him down arrows to shoot on the city that had exiled him. And indeed the success of their conspiracy had been marvellous. In old times they had looked out of this house under lowered and defiant brows, knowing there was none without who knew of them who did not despise them. But now they could smile tenderly and derisively out into this hushed moonlight that received the uncountable and fatuously peaceful breaths of the sleepers who had been their enemies and were to be their slaves. It was strange that at this of all instants she should for the space of a heartbeat lose her sense of the uniqueness of her fate and be confounded by amazement at the common lot in which they two and the vanquished sleepers alike partook. Was it possible that this could be? That this plethora of beings that coated the careless turning earth like grains of dust on a sleeping top were born--mysterious act!--and mated--act so much more mysterious than it seemed!--and died--act which was the essence of mystery! She was dizzied with astonishment, and to steady herself put out her hands and caught hold of those broad shoulders, which, her marvelling mind recalled to her, she had miraculously been able to make out of her so much less broad body. She felt guilty as she recovered, for the habit of thinking about subjects unconnected with her family had always seemed to her as unwomanly as a thin voice or a flat chest. Penitently she dropped a kiss on his forehead and muttered, "Richard, you're a good son. You've made up for everything I've been through many times over...."

"Then stay up with me a little," he said. "Don't let's go to bed yet." He stretched out his arm and moved a wicker armchair that stood on the hearth till it faced the grate. "Sit down, dear, and I'll make you a fire. Dear, do sit down. This is the last night we shall have together." She obeyed, for he spoke with the sullenness which she knew to be in him a mask of intense desire. He busied himself with the fire and coal that the servants had left ready for the morning, and when he had made a blaze he squatted down on the rug and rested his head on her lap and seemed to sleep.

But he did not. Against the fine silk of her kimono she felt the sweep of his eyelashes. "Why is he doing this?" she wondered; and discovered happily, "Ah, he is going to tell me about Ellen." She waited serenely, while the clock ticked.

Presently he spoke, but did not lift his head. "Mother, I like being here...."

She was not perturbed because he then fell silent. It was natural enough that he should be shy of speaking of his other love.

But he continued: "Mother, do you know why I would always have stuck to my people, no matter how they'd treated me? I wonder if you'll think I'm mad? I'd have stuck to them in any case--because they've got the works on Kerith Island, and I've always wanted to work there. Think of it! I shall be able to sleep here at night and go out in the morning to a place I've seen all my life out of these windows. And all day long I'll be able to put my head out of my lab. door and look along the hill to our tree-tops. Mother, I do love this house," he said earnestly, raising his head and looking round the kitchen as if even it were dear to him, though he could not have been in it more than once or twice before. "It's a queer thing, but though you've altered this completely from what it was when I was a boy, it still seems the oldest and most familiar thing in the world. And though it's really rather exposed as houses go, hanging up here over the marshes, I feel when I come back to it as if I were creeping down into some hiding-place, into some warm, closed place where nothing horrible could ever find me. Do you feel like that, mother?"

She nodded. "I might hate this house, considering all that's happened here. But I, too ..." She spoke in the slightly disagreeable tone that a reticent nature assumes when it is obliged to confess to strong feeling. "Yes, I love it."

They looked solemnly into the crepitant blaze of the new fire. He grasped her hand; but suddenly released it and asked querulously, as if he had remembered certain tedious obligations: "And Ellen, does she like the house?"

She was appalled, "Yes, yes! I think so," she stammered.

"Good," he said curtly, and buried his head in her lap again.

For as long as possible she endured her dismay; then, bending forward and trying to twist his face round so that she could read it, she asked unsteadily, "Richard, you do love Ellen, don't you?"

He sat up and met her eyes. "Of course I do. Have you been thirty-six hours with her without seeing that I must? She--she's a lamp with a double burner. There's her beauty, and her dear, funny, young little soul. It's good to have someone that one can worship and befriend at the same time. Yes, we're going to be quite happy." His eyes slid away from hers evasively, then hardened and resolved to be honest, and returned again. "Mother, I tell you this is the end." After that his honesty faltered. He chose to take it that his mother was looking so fixedly at him because she had not understood the meaning of his words, so he repeated soberly, "I tell you, this is the end. The end of love making for me. I shall never love any other woman but Ellen as long as I live." And he turned to the fire, the set of his shoulders confessing what his lips would not--that though he loved Ellen, though he wanted Ellen, there was something imperfect in the condition of his love which made him leaden and uneager.

"That's right, that's right; you must be good to her," Marion murmured, and stroked his hair. "I don't think you could have done better than your Ellen if you'd searched the whole world," she said timidly, trying to give him a cue for praise of his love. "It's such astonishing luck to find a girl whose sense will be as much solid good to you as a fortune in the bank and who looks as pretty as a rose-tree at the same time."

He made no response. The words were strangled in her throat, and she fell to tapping her foot rhythmically against the fender. Her eyes were moist; this was so different from the talk she had expected.

Presently his shoulders twitched. "Don't do that, mother dear," he said impatiently.

"I'm sorry, darling," she answered wearily. She threw herself back in her chair and clenched her fists. Desperation fevered her, and she began to speak vindictively. "Of course it was a great relief to me when I saw the kind of girl Ellen is, considering how up till now you've sidled past women of any sort of character as if you'd heard that men got sent to prison for loving any but fools."

He laughed uneasily.

"Yes," she went on; "you always seemed to be looking carefully for anything you could find that was as insipid as a water-melon. You can't, you know, possibly count your love-affairs as amongst your successes." She jerked her head back, her lips retracted in a kind of grin. "Mariquita de Rojas!" she jeered.

He started, though not much. "I never knew you knew about that," he said mildly.

"Of course I did." She quivered with exaggerated humiliation. "To see my son spending himself on something so nearly nothing. And then the way you moped and raged at her when she threw you over. Seeing the poor woman was a fool, how else could you expect her to behave but like a fool? It was undignified of you to put the burden of being the woman you loved on a poor thing like her--like overworking a servant girl." She perceived that she was hot and shaking, and that she was within an ace of betraying the secret that there sometimes rose in her heart a thirst to beat and hurt every woman that he had ever loved. Words would pour out that would expose her disgusting desire to strike and scratch if she did not substitute others. So she found herself crying in a voice that was thinner than hers: "And a married woman! To see you doing wrong!"

The moment she said it she was ashamed and drew an expunging hand across her lips. And as she had feared, he threw over his shoulder a glance that humorously recognised the truths which she had insincerely suppressed: that while she desired to hurt the woman whom he had loved, she would gladly have murdered any woman who had refused to love him, whether married or single; and that she had never cared what he had done so long as he did not lose his physical and moral fastidiousness, and did not lust after flesh that, having rotted its nerves with delight unsanctioned by the spirit, knew corruption before death, and so long as he had not pretended to any woman that he wanted her soul when he wanted her body.

Seeing the tears in her eyes, he said kindly: "Well, I never thought Mariquita's marriage counted for much. Do you remember how you took her in one night when old de Rojas hid in a cloisonne vase on the verandah for cover and potted at the stars with his gun?" But in his voice she read wonder that for the first time in his life he should have found his honest mother forging a moral attitude.

It was dreadful that, on this of all nights, and so soon after a special illumination of their relationship, she should have set him making allowances for her to cover up her insincerity. She stammered miserably: "Well, Ellen's a dear, dear girl," and twisted her fingers in her lap, and cried out in a fresh access of fever: "It's strange: this is a cold night, and yet I feel hot and heavy and sticky as I did in Italy when the sirocco blew."

He slid his hand into hers again and altered his position so that he could smile up into her face. "Yes, she's a dear girl," he agreed comfortingly.

"Then marry her soon!" she begged. "You're thirty. It's time you had a life of your own. You must make the ties that will last when I am dead. Marry her soon."

"Yes," he said. "I will marry her soon."

"At once!" she urged. "You can be married in three weeks, you know, if you set things going immediately. You'll see about it to-morrow, won't you?"

He said nothing, but stroked her hand.

"You will do that?" she almost shrieked.

He moistened his dry lips. "I hadn't thought ... quite so soon...."

"Why not? Why not?"

"She is so very young," he mumbled, and turned away his face.

"Why, Richard, Richard!" she exclaimed softly. "God knows I'm not in love with old-fashioned ideas. I've only to put up my hand behind my ear to feel a scar they gave me thirty years ago when I was hunted down Roothing High Street. But it seems to me that the new-fashioned ideas are as mawkish as the old ones were brutal. And worst of all is this idea about marriage being dreadful." She blushed deeply. "It's not. What you make of it may be, but the thing itself is not. If Ellen's old enough to love you, she's old enough to marry you. Oh, if you miscall--that, you throw dirt at everything." She paused; and it rushed in on her that he, too, had told a lie. To make an easy answer to her inconvenient question he had profaned his conviction that the life of the body was decorous and honourable. Why were they beginning to lie to each other, like other mothers and sons?

He liked his error as little as she liked hers. "It's all right, mother," he said drearily; and, after some seconds, added with false brightness: "I'm sorry in a way I didn't wait till to-morrow morning in town. I wanted to buy something for Ellen. I've never given her anything really good. It cost me next to nothing to live in Scotland. I've got lots of money by me. I thought a jade necklace. It would look jolly with her hair. Or, better still, malachite beads. But they're more difficult to get."

"Ah, jewellery," she said.

"Well, I suppose it's the best thing to give a girl," he assented, unconscious of her irony.

Now that she had heard him designing to give jewels to his little Ellen, that earnest child who thought only of laying up treasure in heaven and would say bravely to the present of a string of pearls, "Thank you, they're verra nice," and grieve silently because no one had thought to give her a really good dictionary of economic terms, she knew for certain that he had travelled far out of the orbit of his love. The heart is a universe, and has its dark, cold, outer space where there are no affections; and there he had strayed and was lost. It was not well with him. Furtively she raised her handkerchief to her eyes. This was not the hour that she expected when she had opened the door and seen her son, and beyond him the gleaming night that had seemed to promise ecstasy to all that were about and doing in its span. Well, outside the house that perfect night must still endure, though it would be falling under the dominion of the dawn. The shadows of the trees would be lengthening on the lawn like slow farewells; but the fields were still suffused with that light which proceeds from the chaste moon's misconceptions of human life and love. For the moon sees none but lovers, or those who stay awake by bedsides out of mercy, or those who sleep; and men and women when they sleep look pitiful and innocent. So it sends down on earth this light that is as beautiful as love, and soft as mercy, and the very colour of innocence itself. It had seemed to Marion that often those who walked in those beams tried to justify the moon's faith in them. Harry had been the sweeter lover when the nights were not dark; when there was this noble glory in the sky his passion had changed from greed for something as easily attainable as food, to hunger for something hardly to be attained by man. Perhaps his son, if he would walk in the moonlight, would remember that which he had forgotten. She said eagerly: "Richard, before you go to bed, let us go out into the garden, and look at the moon setting over Kerith Island."

"No," he said obstinately, and laid his head on her lap. She began to rock herself with misery, until he made a faint noise of irritation. There followed a long space when the clock ticked, and told her that there was no hope, things never went well on this earth. Then he exclaimed suddenly, "Marion."

"Yes?"

She had hoped that there had come into his mind some special aspect of Ellen's magic which he loved and desired to share with her. But he muttered, "That box on the dresser. Up there on the top shelf."

She followed his eyes in amazement. "The scarlet one in the corner? That belongs to cook. I think it's her workbox. What about it?"

He stared at it with a drowsy smile. "You had a cloak that colour when I was a child," he murmured, and again buried his head in her lap.

"Why, so I had," she said softly, and thought proudly to herself, "How he loves me! He speaks of trifling things about me as if they were good ale that he could drink. He speaks like a sweetheart...." And then caught her breath. "But that," she wept on, "is how he ought to speak of Ellen, not of me." A certain gaunt conviction stood up and stared into her face She wriggled in her seat and looked down on her strong, competent hands, and said to herself uneasily: "I wish life could be settled by doing things and not by thinking...." But the conviction had, by its truthfulness, rammed in the gates of her mind. She cried out to herself in anguish: "Of course! Of course! He cannot love Ellen because he loves me too much! He has nothing left to love her with!" A tide of exultation surged through her, but she knew that this was the movement within her of the pride that leads to death. For if Richard went on loving her over-much, the present would become hideous as she had never thought that the circumstances of her splendid son could do. The girl would grieve; and she would as soon that Spring itself should have its heart hurt as dear little Ellen. And there would be no future. She would have no grandchildren. When she died he would be so lonely.... And it was her own fault. All her life long she had let him see how she wanted love and how she had been deprived of it by Harry's failure; and so he had given her all he had, even that which he should have kept for his own needs. "What can I do to put this right?" she asked herself. "What can I do?"

She found that his eyes were staring up at her from her lap. "Mother, what's the matter?"

"The matter?"

"You were looking at me like a judge who's passing sentence."

"Well, perhaps I am," she said wearily. "Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father."

His face grew dark, as it always did when he thought of his father. "Well, if you had done that I should have had a pretty bad time."

It occurred to her that there was a way, an easy way, by which she could free Richard from his excessive love for her. He would not love her any more if she told him.... "But, oh, I couldn't tell him that," her spirit groaned. "It is against nature that anyone but me should know of that. It would spoil it to speak of it." But there was no other way. If she were to go away from him he would follow her. There was no other way.

She shivered and smiled down on him, into his answering eyes. It was strange to think that this was the last time they would ever look at each other quite like that. She prepared to bring herself down like a hammer on her own delicate reluctances.

"Hush, Richard," she said. "You shouldn't talk like that. Perhaps I ought to have told you long ago that your father and I made it up before he died."

He picked himself up and stood looking down on her.

"Yes, the day before he died we made it up," she began, but fell silent because of the beating of her heart.

Presently he broke out. "What do you mean? Tell me what you mean."

"Why, let's see, it was like this," she continued. "It was in the afternoon. Half-past two, I think. I was baking a cake for your tea. Of course that was in the old kitchen, on the other side of the house, which opened into the farmyard. Well, I looked up and saw your father standing in the doorway. I knew that meant that something strange was happening. From his coming at all, for one thing. And because he hadn't got the dogs with him. I knew that meant he'd wanted to be alone, which he hardly ever did. Those were the two greyhounds he had after Lesbia and Catullus died. How funny--how funny to think I never knew their names." This measure of how utterly she and her lover had been exiled from each other's lives filled her eyes with tears. She encouraged them, so that Richard might see them and be angry with her.

Something about his silence assured her that she had succeeded. She went on chokingly: "He said, 'Well, Marion?' I said, 'Well, Harry? Come in, if you wish to.' But I went on baking my cake. He came and stood quite close to me. There was a pile of sultanas on the table, and he helped himself to one or two. Then, all of a sudden, he said, 'Marion, I've got to have an operation, and they say I'm pretty bad. I did so want to come and see you.'"

Richard spoke in a voice as quiet as hers. "The whining cur! The snivelling cur! To come to you when he was afraid, after what he'd left you to for years."

"Oh, hush!" she prayed. "He is dead, and he was your father. Well, I took him into the other room and gave him a cup of tea, and he told me all about it. Poor Harry! He'd had a lot of pain. And dying is a dreadful thing, if you aren't old. I'm fifty, but I should be terribly frightened to die. And Harry was not much over forty. I remember him saying just like a child, 'I wonder, now, if there is another world, will it be as jolly as this?'"

"The brute! The beast! A jolly world he'd made for you!"

"Oh, Richard, don't be too hard on him. And don't you see that he said that sort of thing because he really was like a child and didn't realise what life was, and consequently he hadn't ever had any idea what it had been like for me? Really, really he hadn't understood."

"Hadn't understood leaving you to Peacey? Mother--if I'd done that to a woman, what would you have said?"

"But, dear, of course one has a higher standard for one's son than for one's husband. One expects much more."

"Why?"

"Perhaps because one's sure of getting it." She tried to smile into his eyes and coquette with him as she had used to do. But he was like a house with shuttered windows. She trembled and went on: "Well, we talked. He asked a lot about you. Dear, you can't think what it meant to him not to have you with him. You don't care about children. I've been worried about that sometimes. But that'll come. I'm sure it will. But men like him ache for sons. If they haven't got them they feel like a mare that's missed her spring. Daughters don't matter. That's because a son's a happier thing than a daughter--there's something a little sad about women, don't you think, Richard? I suppose it's something to do with this business of having children--and men like that do so love happiness. He had coveted you most terribly when he saw you about the lanes. Truly he had. Then he said he felt tired, and he lay down on the couch. I covered him with a rug, and he had a little sleep. Then he woke up and said he must go because there was a solicitor coming at four, and he was going to settle everything so that it was all right for you and me. Then we said good-bye. And on the step he turned round and asked if I thought you would like a Sealyham pup. And I said I thought you would."

"Mother, it wasn't Punch?"

"Yes. It was Punch."

She noted the murderous gesture of his hands with bitter rapture. He had loved that dog, but now he wished he could hail it out of death so that he could send it back there cruelly. He was then capable of rooting up old affections. She was not permitted to hope for anything better.

She pretended anger. "You've taken more than a dog from him. You know that it's his money that's made life so easy for us."

"I should have had that by right. And you should have been at Torque Hall."

The thought of what Torque Hall would have been at this hour if he had, so full of lovely sleeping sons and daughters, made her sigh. She went on dully: "Well, that's all. He turned at the gate and waved good-bye. And the next day when you came in from school you told me he was dead." For a time she looked down into the depths of her old sorrow. When she raised her eyes, she was appalled by his harsh refusal to believe that there was any beauty in her story, and she forgot why she was telling it, and stammered out: "Richard, Richard, don't you understand? Don't you feel about Ellen that there was a part of you that loved her long before you ever met? It was like that with Harry and me. There was a part in each of us that loved the other long before we knew each other--and though Harry left me and I was bitter against him, it didn't matter. That part of us went on loving all the time, and making something--something--" Her hands fluttered before her; she gasped for some image to express the high spiritual business that had been afoot, and her eyes rolled in ecstasy till they met his cold glance. "It is so!" she cried defiantly.

The silence throbbed and was hot. She dropped her head on her hand and envied the quiet, moonlit marshes.

He shrugged his shoulders and moved towards the door. "I'm going to bed," he said.

"That's right," she agreed, and rose and began to clear the table. Uneasily he stood and watched her.

"Where does the Registrar live?" he asked suddenly.

"The Registrar?"

"Yes. I want to go to-morrow and put up the banns, or whatever it is one does."

"Of course, of course. Well, the registrar's named Woodham. He lives in the house next the school. 'Mizpah,' I think they call it. He's there only in the afternoon. Did you specially want to go to-morrow?"

"Yes," he said. "Good-night."

When he had gone upstairs she lifted her skirts and waltzed round the table. "Surely I've earned the right to dance a little now," she thought grimly. But it was not very much fun to dance alone, so she went up to her room, shielding her eyes with her hand as she passed his door. She flung herself violently down on the bed, as if it were a well and there would be the splash of water and final peace. She had lost everything. She had lost Richard. When she had trodden on that loose board in the passage, that shut door might so easily have opened. She had lost the memory that had been the sustenance of her inmost, her most apprehensive and despairing soul. For it was the same memory now that she had spoken of it. Virtue had gone out of it. But she was too fatigued to grieve, and presently there stood by her bedside a phantom Harry, a pouting lad complaining of his own mortality. She put out her hand to him and crooned, "There, there!" and told herself she must not fidget if he were there, for the dead were used to quietness; and profound sleep covered her.

Suddenly she awoke and found herself staring towards panes exquisite with the frost's engravings, and beyond them a blue sky which made it seem that this earth was a flaw at the heart of a jewel. Words were on her lips. "Christ is risen, Christ is risen." It was something she had read in a book; she did not know why she was saying it. The clock said that it was half-past eight, so she leaped out of bed into the vibrant cold, and bathed and dressed. Her sense of ruin was like lead, but was somehow the cause of exultation in her heart as the clapper is the cause of the peal of a bell. She went and knocked on Ellen's door. There was no answer, so she stole in and stood at the end of the bed, and looked with laughter on the heap of bedclothes, the pair of unravelling plaits that were all that was to be seen of the girl.

"Ellen," she said.

The child woke up as children do, stretching and sulking. Marion loved her. She must suffice instead of the other child, the boy that should have slept in the room of the corridor in Torque Hall.

"Ellen, something wonderful has happened. Guess what it is."

Ellen lay on her back and speculated sleepily. Her little nose waggled like a rabbit's. Suddenly she shot up her head.

"I know. We've got the vote."

"Not quite as good as that. But Richard's come."

The girl sat up. "When did he come?"

"Last night."

"Last night? Would I have seen him if I'd stayed up longer?"

"No. He came very late indeed. It was really this morning."

Ellen sighed with relief. "Then the occasion's pairfect, for I've nothing to reproach myself with." She put her hand on one side and said shyly, "Please, I'd like to get up." Marion still hovered, till she noticed the girl's eyes were unhappy and that she was holding the sheet high up to the base of her white throat, and perceived that she was too modest to rise when anyone else was in the room. "How wise you are, my dear," she thought, and she left the room. "You are quite right; secrets lose their value when they are disclosed...."

She went down and ate her breakfast before a long window that showed a glittering, rimy world and in the foreground a plump, strutting robin. Ordinarily she would not have been amused by his red-waisted convexity, for she regarded animals with an extreme form of that indifference she felt for all living beings who were not members of her family, but to-day, she scattered it some crumbs. After that she walked to the end of the garden and looked down on the estuary's morning face. It was a silver plate on which there lay but a drop of deeply blue water, and the floating boats seemed like flies settled there to drink. The shining green marshes were neatly ruled with lines of unmelted frost that scored the unsunned westerly side of every bank, and the tiny grizzled trees and houses here and there might have been toys made of crockery, like the china cottages that stand on farmstead mantelpieces. From the chimneys above the rime-checkered slates of the harbour houses a hundred smoke-plumes stood tenuous and erect, like fastidious and honest souls, in the crystalline air. This was an undismayed world that had scoured itself cheerfully for the dawn, no matter what that might bring. She nodded her head, seeing the lesson that it read to her.

Ellen ran across the lawn to her, beetle-black in her mourning, but capering as foals do.

"I'll not have my breakfast till he does," she announced. "Is there anything I can do for him?"

"Nothing, my dear, I'm afraid. But look at the view. Isn't it lovely?"

The girl clapped her hands. "Oh, it's bonny. And it's neat. It's redded itself up for Richard's coming."

"'Redded itself up'? What does that mean?"

"Don't you use the word here? English seems to be a terribly poor language. Redding up means making everything tidy and neat, so that you're ready for anything."

That was what one must do: red oneself up. It was true that it was no use doing that for Richard any more, and that there was no one else in the world for whom she wished to be ready. But she must be schooled by the spectacle of the earth, for here it was shining fair, and yet it had nothing to expect; it was but the icing of a cake destined for some sun's swallowing.

"Is Richard a good riser?" asked Ellen, adopting a severe, servant-engaging tone to disguise the truth that she was trembling with desire to see her lover.

"Usually, but he may be late to-day since he went to bed such a short time ago. He evidently isn't up yet, for his blind's still down. That's his room on the left."

But as they gazed the blind went up, and they saw him turning away from the window.

"Oh, why didn't he look at us!" cried Ellen. "Why didn't he look at us?"

"Because he is thinking of nothing but how soon he can get down to breakfast and meet you," said Marion; but being aware of the quality of her blood, which was his, she knew that he had not seen his women and the glittering world because he had risen blind with sullenness.

"Will he be long, do you think?" she pondered. "Not that I'd want him to miss his bath." She broke into a kind of Highland fling, looking down on the blue and silver estuary and chanting, "Lovely, lovely," but desisted suddenly and asked: "Mrs. Yaverland, do you think there's a future life?"

Marion said lazily, "I shouldn't have thought you need to think out that problem yet awhile."

"Oh, I'm not worrying for myself. But on a fine day like this I just hate to think my mother's not getting the benefit of it somewhere. And seeing your age, I thought you might have begun to give the matter consideration."

Marion resolved to treasure that remark for repetition to Richard; and was dashed to remember that it was probable in future they would not share their jokes. "Well, I don't think there's any evidence for it at all," she said aloud; "but I don't think that proves that there isn't one. I don't think we would be allowed to know if there was one, for I'm sure that if most people knew for certain there was going to be another world they wouldn't make the best of this." But she saw, from the way that Ellen continued to stare down at her toes, that that abstract comfort had not been of any service, so she parted with yet another secret. "But I do know that when Richard's father died all the trees round the house seemed to know where he had gone."

Ellen raised wet but happier eyes. "Why, I felt like that when they brought mother's coffin out of the Fever Hospital. Only then it was the hills in the distance that knew--the Pentland Hills. But do you really think that was true?"

"I knew it was then," said Marion. "If I am less certain now it is only because I have forgotten."

They nodded wisely. "After all, there must be something."

"Yes, there must be something...."

Ellen began to dance again. Marion turned aside and tried to lose the profound malaise that the reticent feel when they have given up a secret in thinking how well worth while it had been, since Ellen was such a dear, young, loving thing. She found consolation in this frost-polished morning: the pale, bright sky in which the light stood naked, her abandoned veil of clouds floating above the horizon; the swoop and dance over the marshes of the dazzling specks that were seagulls; the fur of rime that the dead leaves on the hedgerow wore, and the fine jewellery-work of the glistening grass tufts in its shadow. The world had neglected nothing in its redding up.

At her elbow Ellen spoke shyly. "Richard's come down at last. May I go in to him, Mrs. Yaverland?"

"Of course you may. You can do anything you like. From now onwards he's yours, not mine."

Ellen ran in and Richard came to the window to meet her. As he drew her over the threshold by both hands he called down the garden, "Good morning, mother." But Marion had perceived that from the moment of seeing her his face had worn the dark colour of estrangement. She turned and walked blindly away, not noticing that Mabel had come out to bring her the morning post, and was following at her heels, till the girl coughed.

There were four letters. She opened them with avidity, for they were certificates that there were other things in life as well as Richard with which she could occupy herself. Two were bills, the first from her dressmakers and the other from the dealer who had sold her some coloured glass a few weeks before; and there was a dividend warrant for her to sign and send to her bankers. Sweeping about the lawn as on a stage, she resolved to buy clothes that would make her look like other untormented women, and more hangings and pictures and vases to make her house look gay. Then she observed that the fourth envelope was addressed in the handwriting of the son whom she could not love.

She looked towards the house and saw the son whom she loved, but he did not see her. Ellen's red head was close to his shoulder.

It was horrible handwriting outside and inside the envelope: a weak running of ink that sagged downwards in the second half of every line and added feeble flourishes to every capital that gave the whole an air of insincerity. It had the disgusting appearance of a begging letter, and indeed that was what it was. It begged for love, for condonation of the writer's loathsomeness. She held it far off as she read:

"DEAR MOTHER,

"You will be wondering why I had not written to you. You will know soon that something you would not have expected has happened to me. I am not sure how you will take it. But I will be with you in two days, and then you will see for yourself. I hope you will not harden your heart against me, dear mother.

"Your loving son,

"ROGER."

There was no address, but the postmark was Chelmsford. No doubt he had written in the cells. For the letter could have no other meaning but that the disgrace she had foreseen had at last arrived.

She could not bear to be out there alone on that wide lawn, in the bright light, in the intense cold. She ran to the window, and not daring to look in lest they should be very close together, she called, "Richard, Roger is coming."

There was a noise of a chair being pushed back, and Richard stood over her, asking: "When? Has he written?"

She held out the letter.

There was the rustling of paper crushed in the hand, and she looked up into his burning and compassionate eyes. Her head dropped back on her throat; she grew weak with happiness. He was her own once more, if she would but disclose in what great fear and misery she stood. But in the room behind there sounded the chink of china. Little Ellen was bending over the table, putting the tea-cosy over Richard's egg.

Marion said levelly: "Well, I shall be glad of Roger's company while you're occupied with Ellen." She added reprovingly, as if she were speaking to a child: "You mustn't be jealous of the poor thing. I saw last night that you can be jealous...."

His eyes blazed at the indecency. He stepped back from the window.